PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological*
This may well be the most generic superspy movie anyone ever made.
I mean, when I reviewed ONCE UPON A SPY, which THREAT's writer Jimmy Sangster finished about a year after this similar TV-pilot, I could find a few fillips, however minor, that distinguished that superspy flick from all the others. But Sangster seems to have been trying to emulate every shopworn trope he could think of.
Superspy arrives at spy HG. Takes orders from stuffy supervisors. Gets spy-tech from a gaffer (admittedly played by a comely female). Investigates rumors of UFOs that may be connected to illegal activity. Meets the obvious villain, his tough enforcer, and his private army. Gets captured but is kept alive to serve as an emissary, which never happens. Manages to escape a death trap and destroy the villain's installation. Congratulates himself afterward with convenient babes.
The only routine trope not used here is that villain Horatio Black (Patrick MacNee) doesn't have any bad girls in his employ. The only tiny point of originality is that the urbane evildoers has two female guests, identical twins Holly and Ivy (Beth and Karen Specht), who are also the source of the only bearable humor in the flick. Dale Robinette, a good-looking but un-dynamic leading man, plays the agent, Robert Sands, whose name sounds like that of the protagonist for the slightly earlier BLACK SAMURAI. He spends most of the movie trading barbs with the villain and only has one climactic fight with enforcer Robert Tessier, who, whoop-de-do, has a metal hand. Oddly, actor Harold Sakata, who played one of the world's favorite enforcer-types as "Oddjob" in GOLDFINGER, has a small role as "Oriental Man" in THREAT.
Like Sangster, director Barry Shear had seen better days, including episodes of both MAN FROM UNCLE and GIRL FROM UNCLE. This one is for spy-completists only.
No comments:
Post a Comment